Progress report (somewhat redundant)

Here's a better look at the before and after of the yard. The "before" is from September 2011, the "after" from May 2012. It still has a long way to go, but it's starting to emerge. The current goal is just to get a visible, mostly grass filled lawn with beds along the fences. Once that's finished I can worry about perennials, edging, and so forth.





Photos are in two columns here, left column is old yard, right column is new yard.





In the process of going through the overgrowth, I've found quite a few established plants hidden in various places, some of which had clearly spread themselves from their original locations (irises, daylilies, butterfly bush?, daisies, periwinkle, lemon balm, mint, hot pepper bush, daffodils, crocuses, several rose varieties...). So far, I've also dug up around 50 bricks, which will hopefully become a small patio on which the firepit can live for the moment. Sometime in the future, the patio can expand and accomodate furniture, too. All of which necessitates my tearing up a mediocre patch of grass, leveling, laying bricks, tamping, filling... hopefully with a really cool pattern.

The left side still needs a lot of work, but at least there's some yard on the right side now. There's a grape vine over the bed in the back that I'd like to train up to replace some of the mulberry that's sneaking up the fence back there. And last week I took out the spare wild rose bush that was crowding the raspberries. Oh and one neighbor put up a nice privacy fence, too, so that looks better than the chain-link and provides well, privacy.

How inner conflict makes dullards of us all

r something like that. Having never read Chekov previously and also having no historical context for his writing, what follows is an entirely off-the-cuff stream of thoughts relating to the short novel, The Duel (translated by Constance Garnett, as recommended by Hemingway).

On the surface, this seems to be a story about a bunch of locals with nothing better to do than squabble and moralise at each other. Since all they have are their own experiences and opinions and lack much depth, they are not terribly interesting or sustainable characters, but their observations of each other carry some weight to the reader.

Instead of just taking the situation at face value, it's also possible to see the conflict as a metaphor for the conflict within an individual. In particular, the two gentlemen who wind up dueling, Laevsky and Von Koren, might be representative of the conflicting aspects of a personality, two ways in which to react to the surrounding world. Both consider society to be broken and useless. Laevksy chooses to spend his life full of apathy and regret, avoiding engagement, while Von Koren displays aggression towards others in a misconstrued attempt to bring them around to his philosophy, and also toward himself in order to maintain his prescription of action.

By the time the characters reach the grounds of the duel, they have both lost their motivation and aggression and decide not to follow through. They are the dueling aspects of a personality: at great odds with each other right up until the critical point, when nothing comes of the whole business (and the deacon steps in! Don't get me started on spirituality). They continue on their paths and gradually make some changes in their lives, but the grand, driving force of pure dogmatism has disappeared.

So I suppose the lesson I took from this was that holding your ground and acting on/being true to your character is important to maintaining an identity and strong progression through life. Don't stand still or get lost in internal debate, but use conflict to come to new places in thought and in life. Or something like that.

Garden Variety Anxiety

uch to my dismay, Twitter has trained me to only have witty, entertaining thoughts in 140 character spans. This makes writing blog posts a humorless and rambly process, especially if I don't crank out a post immediately when inspiration strikes (whaBAM).

So now here I am, three weeks after starting an ambitious yard rehabilitation project (it's impossible to phrase that in any clever or alliterative manner. Cookie to anyone who can) trying to remember what I wanted to say about it.

I guess the first thing would be "hire a dang landscaper with a backhoe," if you can. The yard I'm working with is (according to Zillow.com) 0.13 acres, maybe half of it taken up by the house, but with a good sized front yard and considerable backyard. When we moved in, all but maybe, maybe 20% of the backyard was either underwater or overgrown. I wouldn't want to lose the topsoil by having heavy machinery rip out the overgrowth, but regrading would be easier, nay-doable with something more efficient than a shovel.




Anyway, having thrown my back out doing too much of that by hand (and the upcoming birthday doesn't make me feel younger, either), I'm going to wait for it to actually rain again before reevaluating the drainage situation. I improvised a rain garden with existing daylilies and added irises, bee balm and a willow stick which will hopefully sprout (they always do when I don't want them to...) and a little slope and dip for water to accumulate in.





Mostly, the rest of the work is ripping out vines (english ivy, poison ivy, virginia creeper, roses, that variegated purple flowering thing and whatever else) and hopefully getting grass to grow. The new lawn needs to be tilled and aerated, but there are so many roots and bricks (which is great, I'm planning a patio, too, but at 30+ bricks randomly strewn around the yard under the grass...) I'm not sure a rototiller is a good idea.  So for the moment, turning over a new garden bed, an existing one and getting my seedlings in will take top priority.



After all of that, I'm (understandably, I hope) anxious about getting everything to grow. The addition of (free!) composted horse manure that I lugged up from Lorton (yes, by myself, in contractor bags, in my little honda) should be enough to improve the soil and feed the plants. For exciting realtime updates, just follow the hashtag: #gardenvarietyanxiety. ¹

1. Note that because twitter is stupid, the hashtag isn't searchable. Yet.

Etymology, or, Seeing the trees for the forest

eautiful.         Pronunciation:  /ˈbjuːtɪfʊl/
Forms: beautefull, beutifull, beutyfull, bewtifull, bewtyfull, beuty-, butyful, beautifull, beautyfull, beautiful, beautifull.

Etymology:  < beauty n. + -ful suffix. Occas. compared with -er, -est, usually with more, most.

A.2.a.  Affording keen pleasure to the senses generally.

A.3. Impressing with charm the intellectual or moral sense, through inherent fitness or grace, or exact adaptation to a purpose. ¹

Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.²

beauty, n.   Pronunciation: /ˈbjuːtɪ/
Etymology:  Middle English bealte,  beute, < Old French bealte, beaute,  biaute,  earlier beltet, modern beauté, (cognate with Provencal beltat,  beutat, Spanish beldad, Italian beltà ) < late Latin *bellitātem, < bellus beautiful: see -ty suffix¹.

I. abstractly: 2. That quality or combination of qualities which affords keen pleasure to other senses, or which charms the intellectual or moral faculties, through inherent grace, or fitness to a desired end; cf. beautiful adj. 3.

   A girl came in the café and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.
   I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in the story, or anywhere, but she had placed herself so she could watch the street and the entry and I knew she was waiting for someone. So I went on writing.
   The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another run St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.
   I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil. ³

1. "Beautiful, adj. and n." Second edition, 1989; online version December 2011. <http://0-www.oed.com.libsys.arlingtonva.us/view/Entry/16680>; accessed 26 February 2012. Earlier version first published in New English Dictionary, 1887.
2. Baudelaire, Charles. "L’Invitation au Voyage." Online version 21 mars 2012 à 15:42 <http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Invitation_au_voyage_(poéme)>; accessed 30 March 2012.
3. Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner, 1964. Print.

Photos of phood: Nougatine Pastry Crisps

ood lord.
I haven't posted since the holidays! The horror! Much didn't happen, then much did happen, and now I've got several drafted posts to get out and need to decide which go first. So instead, here's a couple photos of the most recent baking incident.

Earlier this month I had a request for palmiers as a birthday gift, so I [somewhat foolishly] bought a log of Amish butter from the local butcher. Foolish because 1) I neglected to notice that this was *salted* butter, something I never use and 2) it will always smell like butcher shop to me. Also probably 3) 2lbs of butter was more than I needed and more expensive than the perfectly good Cabot at home, but heck. Anyway, I had half left over and the fastest way to get rid of butter is in a 1lb butter package in pastry, SO:

Made puff pastry dough. ... only then did I go through a few recipes and realise that everything called for ingredients I didn't have (and I try to bake only with things on-hand, otherwise it would become a huge expense very quickly), fruit and cream and whatnot. Palmiers really only use butter, flour and sugar, which makes them very convenient. Eventually I found a recipe for an assembled dessert from the Ritz involving sort of a pastry sandwich around a cream/fruit filling from the Pie and Pastry Bible (I know, I know, big surprise, I'm using the book again).

The pastry discs are simply slabs of the dough rolled out thin and baked between cookie sheets to keep them flat. However, the secret (or not) addition is the nougatine crumble which tops them. I doubled the original recipe for this (figuring it can go on yogurt and stuff, too) and got a nice sheet of almond filled crunchy caramel. With a crumbled spoonful of this sprinkled on top, the pastry rounds become cookies with slightly chewy caramel and nutty almonds on top. Easy enough, attractive, and so flakey you can barely pick one up.

Merry Christmoose!

Here's a selection of photos from things done in the days betwixt holidays this last month. Some crafty stuff, some baking stuff, some decorations... A decently festive month, indeed.

Click for bigger and explanations.

Quotations: Calvino

n the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered, with a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress where other troops are holding out:

     the Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages,

     the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success,

     the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment,

     the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case,

     the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,

     the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,

     the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.

Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large, but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them...

 From If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, by Italo Calvino. Wonderful book, you should go read it.

Books read in Chincoteague (7 of 7): The Cabinet of Curiosities

ast but certainly not least we have a book acquired from one Jeff VanderMeer, signed by said editor and his accomplice, Ann VanderMeer, and kindly shipped to me for review purposes an embarrassingly long time ago. As is appropriate to such an anthology of bits and pieces, I read The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities in fits and starts, probably beginning by the pool last summer, the majority read at Chincoteague, and finished post-move in the new house. On the other hand, it's a rich and complex enough world to sink into, if one tends towards more efficient, focused reading.

This level of complexity largely stems from the wide array of contributors to this steampunk confluence, including Garth Nix, Tad Williams, Cherie Priest (of Boneshaker) and Alan Moore. While there were amusing oddities described in brief at various points in the book, the short stories have continued to stand out in my mind. The Relic, a story of a sand-bound church and its odd holy item, has stuck with me most. Some of the content felt mildly forced from the authors' pens, as if they had a story to tell, but had to include that one pesky element (the curiosity). The best written works used the items from Lambshead's cabinet, or snippets about the Doctor himself (because, of course, he was a doctor) to explore into a corner or two of the world set before them. This difference lies between the authors who tried to make the curiosities fit into a world of their own and those who used the curiosity to explore Lambshead's world.

The art is also a wide sweep of varietals, ranging from detailed penwork to signature styles to collaged photographs used to illustrate the [wholly imaginary] cabinet. This is a most impressive anthology, which I will be pleased to keep on my shelf and sometimes flip through to reread a passage or two.

The accidental harmony of the trenches during the war produced, sometimes, odd acquaintances... "Well, that's a proper cup," Russell said softly, as the smell climbed out of the teapot, fragrant and fragile. The brew, when he poured it, was clear amber-gold, and made Edward think of peaches hanging in a garden of shining, fruit-heavy trees, a great sighing breath of wind stirring all the branches to a shake. 

"It'll be all right, you know," Russell said. He rubbed a hand over the teapot. "I don't like to say, because the fellows don't understand, but you see him, too; or at least as much of him as I do... I don't know his name," Russell said thoughtfully. "I've never managed to find out; I don't know that he hears us at all, or thinks of us. I suppose if he ever woke up, he might be right annoyed with us, sitting here drinking up his dreams. But he never has."

Lord Dunsany's Teapot, by Naomi Novik, from The Cabinet of Curiosities. 

Books read in Chincoteague (6 of 7): The Shipping News

arlier in this week of reading I very quickly judged a book to be not-my-type. The same could have happened with The Shipping News, but for the fact that Annie Proulx's writing style (unique, fragmented thought-blows of sentences) drew me in, the hope that things would improve for Quoyle, our protagonist, and the knowledge that the book did pick up in mood after the first few chapters. It was well worth it, and that very same point winds up being the heart of the book.

The early descriptions of Quoyle make him out to be a lumbering clod, barely capable of speech, unattractive in every way, making the reader feel the self-loathing of a young man lost in a highly critical world. As he begins to let his voice be heard, more of his own character comes out, slowly and painfully, and the story moves forward as we get to know him and he gets to know himself. While the beginning of the book is one calamity after another, Quoyle sticks with it and keeps plodding along, going where the winds take him until his fortunes right themselves.




Once I was inside this world, I stopped wanting to leave. One of my favourite quirks in the book is Quoyle's habit of creating impromptu newspaper headlines about the world around him ("Man with Hangover Listens to Boat Builder Project Variables"). There was also the warmth of the closeknit community in the Northern reaches, the intriguing history and mystery of each character and the town, even an abandoned village on a desolate island. I made a point of never checking the publication date on Shipping News, because it sits fairly happily in the near-present, comfortably familiar and nonspecific. Come to think of it, this was probably my favourite book of the week.

"There are four women in every man's heart. The Maid in the Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Stouthearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman."

Books read in Chincoteague (5 of 7): Rereadings

nother weakness: anything with Anne Fadiman's name attached to it. Rereadings is a collection of book reviews that Fadiman ran whilst at The American Scholar literary quarterly. Each review is a rereading of a book the reviewer (usually a writer themselves) had read long in their past. As Fadiman points out, each is more of a mini-memoir than a review of the book itself. Since I seem to currently be into memoirs and essays, this suited me just fine, plus the entire book is making recommendations for further reading! As if I needed more to read!

The eventual conclusion that each review comes to is: Everything Changes but the Past remains the same. The reviewers largely find themselves rereading with more perspective and experience, but remember their old selves, motivations and weaknesses (their ignorance and their bliss) vividly through association with the text. It makes me incredibly happy to hear others talking about their love of books, and how a life of reading has bolstered a life of writing. These aren't great literary accomplishments, these reviews, but they are familiar, as if hearing a friend tell you a long story after dinner in order to make the point: you might like the book, too.

"It never occured to me that the need to catalog the stuff of everyday life might be a sign that the authors I loved were loners and misfits. Normal people, after all, don't stand around at garden parties or lie in bed with their loved ones trying to figure out what even the smallest ordinary gesture means."

-David Samuels, Marginal Notes on the Inner Lives of People with Cluttered Apartments in the East Seventies, a rereading of J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey.


Evidence of the superfluity of books in my life: this wee pile was acquired whilst in Sundial Books, currently the best little bookshop in Chincoteague.